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Why Can’t Coal Companies Do The Same?

When Ashley Judd takes her top off, she doesn't dump huge amounts of toxic heavy metals like arsenic into the local drinking water supply.

A new pro-coal piece of propaganda wonders why coal mines aren’t allowed to take the tops of mountains as easily as women can take off their shirts. Seriously.

A poster making the rounds protests against Appalachian native Ashley Judd, who opposes mountaintop removal coal mining. It asks, “Ashley Judd makes a living taking off her top. Why can’t coal miners?”

Why? For one thing, Ashley Judd knows how to put her top back on. The coal mining companies don’t put the tops back on mountains. They just blow the mountains up and dump the debris into mountain streams.

Secondly, when Ashley Judd takes her top off, she doesn’t dump huge amounts of toxic heavy metals like arsenic into the local drinking water supply. Mountaintop removal coal mining does involve such toxic dumping.

Do these big coal companies truly not understand the difference? Anyone who has flown over the Appalachians recently, and seen the great scars on our nation created by mountaintop removal coal mining gets it.

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Date: July 10, 2010

Author: F.G. Fitzer

Categories: environment

Tags: ashley judd, coal, mining, mountaintop removal, pollution

(3 votes, average: 4.67 out of 5)

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  Nathan Redshield

  in July 12th, 2010 @ 14:13

  Man! Don’t you have a sense of humor, dude? Why it’s as funny and witty as say, Jon Stewart. That’s the sort of humor coal miners like. Tough business, coal; we should consider ourselves lucky there are people willing to do it and other willing to hire them and own the mines. Eventually all those chemicals in the rocks are going to come out; they should be more manageable to handle on land than an oil blowout at sea. In time those levelled mountaintops can be turned into usable prime land–a lot of that sort of thing is going on in western Pennsylvania: strip mine the coal, reclaim the land for prime real estate.

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  Hendrix

  in July 13th, 2010 @ 14:04

  Thanks for not laughing along FGF. Too bad our reality-based logic doesn’t have much chance of penetrating the Appalachian shield of ignorance and greed. If the ad was half as witty as Jon Stewart, the metaphor would be intentionally highlighting that the 2 activities are not comparable, which would be an anti-mining message that coal companies would not sponsor. The pro-mining joke would have to be that the coal miners are taking off their shirts instead of mountain-tops, and that’s not really funny enough for anything beyond the most juvenile beer commercials. Hopefully more logical people will get the un-intended point than what the coal lobby expects.

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  jclifford

  in July 14th, 2010 @ 12:01

  Nathan, the idea that America’s mountains need to be leveled in order to be any good suggests a kind of suburbanization of the entire continent – until it’s all flat and square, we’ll never get one Wal-Mart per 5 square miles in Kentucky, will we?

  True respect for these workers is found in an effort to bring them work that doesn’t KILL them and doesn’t require the destruction of their back yards.

  Destroying an entire mountain for one day’s worth of coal is rotten bargain – and that’s NO joke.

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